I think he is likely talking about a bug in the Happy Meal Ethernet on the Ultra1. There was a bug in the driver up to 2.4.20 which was probably fixed in a recent patch and would make its way into .21.

When you are living with the bug, a burst of data will freeze the ethernet device and you must reboot to recover. The patch introduced a small timing delay and that avoided the bug. This was a fix to the kernel driver, not specific to Gentoo.

I went through this problem on Debian on the Ultra 1 Creator 3D.

If you look at the source code for hme in the kernel sources, you'll see lots of choice comments by the coder related to working with the hardware.

I've got a random number of Sunblade 1000 with dual UltraIII 900mhz with 1.5 Gb of RAM. I say random because the project that they were used on died so they were just stored in my office. I've started playing around with them installing gentoo and such. Now that they have gentoo on them all the sudden people are interested in using them again haha. Oh well. Probabably for the best. I don't think my boss would have been happy that I was using a $15K machine as a nethack server, but its not like anyone wanted the things then.

How did you manage to install Gentoo on them? I always get "Fast MMU miss" errors when i try to boot the gentoo cds... I managed to boot SuSe, but that distribution didn't see the hard-drive, so I couldn't use it to hot-wire gentoo onto it.

EDIT: I am now also running gentoo on the Sun Blade 1000, thanks to the Aurora project, just about the only distribution that would boot AND had the appropriate drivers... Now I'll venture into the land of XFree._________________--
Jan Fredrik Leversund
Dark Overlord for Hire

Last edited by kluzz on Sun Nov 02, 2003 2:25 am; edited 1 time in total

How did you manage to install Gentoo on them? I always get "Fast MMU miss" errors when i try to boot the gentoo cds... I managed to boot SuSe, but that distribution didn't see the hard-drive, so I couldn't use it to hot-wire gentoo onto it.

This should be fixed in the latest Experimental LiveCD. When you install a kernel, you'll probably have to use 2.4.22 or later.

How did you manage to install Gentoo on them? I always get "Fast MMU miss" errors when i try to boot the gentoo cds... I managed to boot SuSe, but that distribution didn't see the hard-drive, so I couldn't use it to hot-wire gentoo onto it.

This should be fixed in the latest Experimental LiveCD. When you install a kernel, you'll probably have to use 2.4.22 or later.

The latest one I've found is gentoo-sparc64-1.4_rc4-13Aug2003.iso.bz2 and it still tells me: SILO Fast Data Access MMU Miss when i type boot cdrom, even after reset-all and various other tricks.

I am the proud new owner of an Ultra 5 w/ 360mhz/512mb/8.3gb HD. Bought it on ebay b/c I always thought owning a sun would be fun.

Greetings and congrats on the hardware.

Quote:

I have gentoo on a bunch of x86 hardware but this is my first non-x86 install (currently in process).

So I hope you guys don't mind some dumb questions!

No worries. If they can tolerate my presence around here, I'm sure you'll get along just fine. I just finished my first Gentoo installation last week on an Ultra 30 and it's only gone down when the power went out. It was the fastest machine to recover and I didn't have to help it at all.

Just recently I got off of the X86 rut, with a $10 sparc5. (a beautiful 85mhz sparc5 router (256meg ram, 4 gig conner hdd, and a couple of happy meals.)

Within a week, I was craving something a little faster. So now I have an Ultra10 360mhz IIi, 512 meg ram, 8 gig barracuda...a bit small, raptor gfx (permedia2 which is not compiled into the livecd kernel) and the best flavor of linux ever. (of course, gentoo)

anybody know why I can't compile sparc-sources without smp. I only have one processor at the moment for the Ultra10._________________LINUX Domination!

Here is the diff report between the sunhme.c driver with and without
the patch on kernel 2.4.22 sources (has not changed recently as I
had hoped it might):

Code:

$ diff sunhme.c.orig sunhme.c
1985a1986
> udelay(1); /* This is the magic line for the Ultra 1 */

This made a great deal of difference to the ethernet device
HME stability on Debian with 2.4.20 kernel, and from what we see
in the sunhme.c version headers, this driver code is still old and
hasn't been updated so the patch most likely still applies.

Well thanks to KG&E's lousy work after a nasty wind storm, I lost the hard drive in my Ultra 5. Everything is lost, and my PC didnt' fair too well either, some corruption, but I managed to salvage its drive. I just finish reinstalling Windows. So for a few days i'm probably PC bound.

Now we reinstall after a lovely trip to Comp USA, at least the trip wasn't fruitless, got some more CD-R's and crickets for the gecko!

Doing my first install of gentoo ever on a sparcstation 20 with a ross chip in it, 9gig barracuda (doesnt really fit in the case properly oh well) and 224 megs memory, 4 nic's, going to be a household router/firewall and shell box when its finished.

I have 22 or so Sunblade 150s a whole lab of them, i call them mine because the computer science teacher who "wanted" them couldn't figure out how to put linux on them Most came with Flatscreens with them its a slick little lab

At school we have 64 Sun Blade 100's I believe. They're sleek little boxes. Very quiet, and very stylish. They're over 3 years old now (maybe more), so I'm hoping they get a kick sometime soon and I can buy one of those. I really like them. Have you seen the new sun workstation? Damn its sexy!

I'm about to get an Ultra AXE board, there are several on ebay for about $55 It is basically a Ultra 5 in an ATX board. It has a 300Mhz UltraSparc IIi cpu. I've got a desktop case that I bought a few years ago because it looked like a Sun workstation that I'm going to put it in.

Memory is a bit scarce for this board but I got lucky and got 256 for $30 (Unfortunately it does not take the same memory as the U5)

I plan on trying both Gentoo and Solaris 9 on it._________________Inspiron 4100 & Sun UltraAXe
Portage on Solaris|Dell Laptop Hacks
The way you feel about organized religion is the same way I feel about organized socialism.